


Underneath (the Knight) (in the night)

by ItWasSomethingAbout



Series: treaty fuckery [1]
Category: Fablehaven Series - Brandon Mull
Genre: Gen, Murder, Not sure how graphic, So yeah, Unreliable Narrator, Warcrimes, and also i decided it didn’t make sense for it to be in stormguard’s safe room, and if it’s not in the safe room it doesn’t make sense for it to be anywhere else in the castle, because then it would just be stupid for it not to be in the safe room, bending the narrator to my will like a sillyband, but light descriptions of pain and violence, curse words, dragon-related arson, i haven't read the geneva convention, i think, in pov death, or the dragon’s never would have got out for cottage cheese, plus - Freeform, poor decision making, ryland's a little too down for genocide, suicidal undertones, the wrymroost treaty is where i say it is godamnit, unreliable protagonists
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-18
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-27 00:47:35
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,236
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30114579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ItWasSomethingAbout/pseuds/ItWasSomethingAbout
Summary: If you asked Aurelia or any other dragon, the treaty had to burn. Wyrmroost had to fall. Lord Dalgorel was of the opinion that this part of the whole mess might have been avoided if they had sent down a therapist for their dragon slayer years ago.
Series: treaty fuckery [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2216040
Comments: 4
Kudos: 4





	Underneath (the Knight) (in the night)

Wyrmroost’s treaty resided with The Somber Knight in the catacombs beneath Terrabelle. Or, more accurately, Wyrmroost’s treaty had its own level beneath the Somber Knight. The idea was that the treaty would be safest in neutral hands, even more so guarded by their dragon slayer. Additionally, it was simple convenience, having the treaty so easily accessible by someone in charge enforcing its boundaries, with the power of changing them. 

Ryland decided it was just one of the many burdens of his existence. Protect the preserve, protect the treaty, enforce its provisions, keep the dragons in line, etc. He would say that he avoided the gargantuan room, but in all honesty he avoided getting out of his chair when he could help it. Which was often. It’s not like he sees much action. Or not like he usually does. He’d had visitors recently. And then he had to go fight dragons, put the taurans in their place, etc. He felt he was owed a nap for the next couple of decades. Most likely he wouldn’t even get a year. Seeing as the dragons were causing problems again.

Flexing his fingers uselessly against the arms of his throne, Ryland wondered if Dragonwatch would ever get around to seeing his side of things. The dragons were simply too much of a danger. And he was sick of dealing with them. Sick of this job. Sick of his chair, even. And he’d have time to be sick of much more, if Lord Dalgorel hadn’t burst through his door.

Panting, hands braced on his knees, Lord Dalgorel huffed a few disjointed words along the lines of “fallen,” “Celebrant,” and “overrun.” Ryland knew he wasn’t getting a week. Sighing, he scooped up his sword. 

“Well, finish gathering yourself for a moment and then let’s hear the whole of it,” Ryland grumbled.

Lord Dalgorel narrowed his eyes at The Somber Knight, straightening himself out with a huff. “One of the caretakers has betrayed the preserve. He released the denizens of Blackwell, the castle and roads are overrun. The preserve has fallen. Celebrant has taken over.”

“Fuck,” Ryland groused, grabbing a makeshift crutch. “Fucking dragons. Why did I ever agree to this job?” 

Lord Dalgorel gaped at him, hobbling through the catacombs. “Where are you going?”

“Where do you think I’m going? To fix things, again.”

Lord Dalgorel spluttered, dashing after him. “How exactly do you think you’re going to fix things? What are you going to do? Fight all of them?”

“Apparently that is my lot in life, Dalgorel.”

“You only have two limbs left from your last fight, Ryland. You’re going to die!”

“God, I hope so.” 

“Now is not the time for that kind of talk,” Lord Dalgorel gasped, affronted. Catching up, he grabbed the Knight’s arm. “Listen, the preserve is already fallen. It’d be better if you stayed here to guard the treaty.” Muttering, he added “Maybe we can send down a therapist, too.”

The Somber Knight glowered down at Dalgorel, wrenching his arm free, continuing. “Terrabelle is a protected territory. I’m hardly needed here more than I am out there. Someone needs to put things to rights, and obviously I’m the one who has to do it.”

With that he was gone. 

Dalgorel crossed his arms, stamping his foot on the damp stone floor. “Fine then, die for all I care. Off on a fool's errand!”

~

The thing about the undead is that they become much less of an issue when you’re immune to magical fear. And, well, the Somber Knight would hardly be qualified as resident dragon slayer if he wasn’t. The walking was an issue, though. And the prospective dragons were, too. Not that he’d ever admit it. More of an opportunity. But the walking, limping really, was the main issue. Ryland healed fast, but he had limits, and regenerating two limbs in a week was firmly outside of them.

It was times like this that Ryland missed Umbro. He would have already passed one of the two safehouses marking the passage between Terrabelle and Blackwell Keep with Umbro. But Umbro was dead -if he was ever alive. Soon he would be, too. Instead, every step was agony and he knew he’d have to run (not to mention, dispel the undead at a much faster rate) if he wanted to get to the safehouse before nightfall. Not happening. It wasn’t entirely likely he’d ever reach a safehouse, odds astronomical that he’d make it to the Keep.

Grunting, Ryland continued anyway. When he faced a dragon he’d keep his head up, and when he went down he promised himself it would be in the carrying out of his duty. With any luck he’d take a few down with him. 

~

Looking at the titanic dragon of emerald, complete with a somewhat disproportionately large head, he wasn’t feeling lucky. He was feeling positively miserable, not much of a departure from somber, and it wouldn’t be too much of a joke to suppose he felt about the same as he always did.

She grinned a grin in vague resemblance of a whale fishing for krill. “Well, look who it is.” She sniffed. “I must say you aren’t looking nearly as well as the last time I saw you.”

Ryland wrapped his armored hand around his sword, pausing to evade a sweltering blast of sickly swirling purplish liquid. The ground where he had been seemed to ooze and wither, the little weed poking through the rocks browning as it curled in on itself, rocks crumbling into dirt, dirt mixing into a bubbling muddy mixture that was more lava than mud.

Grimacing under his helmet, he charged. But -and I really cannot stress this enough- he only had one leg. He wasn’t getting anywhere quickly, and she very much was. He was caught by her darting head, pain lacing through his remaining arm, pressed in on either side by a row of teeth. Biting down a scream, Ryland wondered if he could swing his sword through the barrier of clamping fangs, but it was too late. It was just a moment before his arm was gone, plate armour sliced through. Ryland couldn’t bite it down, then. 

Outside, Jaleesa launched herself into the sky. 

~

She spat him out onto Skyhold’s floor. An ant in a conference of monsters, with armored thumbs and clawed heels, and at the helm of them was Celebrant. That’s not how Ryland saw it, of course, but it was beginning to be, and to any hovering creature that was exactly as it seemed. 

“Look what I’ve brought you.” 

Celebrant nodded at her. “Excellent work, Jaleesa.” Celebrant turned to him with a triumphant smile on his face. “So, if it isn’t the Somber Knight. Out of his hole for the second time in…. What has it been? A day or two. A miracle, truly.”

“All your fault, too.”

“Indeed. And yet much has changed in these last couple days. The last time you were out and about you stripped me of my caretakership. Now the spot is vacant and you’ll be needing someone to take on the mantle, lest the preserve fall into ruin.” called the King in a chorus of velvet voices. 

The Somber Knight snorted. “You’ve already ruined this preserve. There is no more mantle to be had.” 

“This preserve was an abomination to begin with. It deserves ruin, triple that which it’s already had. You put children in charge! Children, all to avoid letting us rule over ourselves,” Celebrant snarled.

“I didn’t put anyone in charge of shit.” Ryland narrowed his eyes, “My job is to come out of my cave whenever you and yours need setting straight. What did you do with the kids anyway?”

The draconic gallery was already uneasy. Going back on their promise to Celebrant at Zzyzx was dishonorable, putting children in charge was a mockery that could hardly go unanswered, and what dragon didn’t find the preserves on some range from unappealing to despicable. But, of course, then there was the sustained record of being outdone by aforementioned children coupled with their King’s missing scales. And then there’s like three levels of don’t kill children. And especially don’t fail to kill children. 

Of course Celebrant was furious, he’d been furious since the beginning of this whole interview and before. He’d had steam wisping out his nostrils, and now it was an outpouring, a great continuous puff as his scales tensed away from one another. But his subjects were hardly pleased, either. They kept glancing at him with their shapings of disdain and distrust.

“They’ve abandoned their post. You have much bigger things to worry about, though. You’ve killed a great many dragons, you know,” Celebrant nodded towards his subjects. “Could anyone really blame them for wanting revenge? For tearing you to pieces, right here and now. The only thing holding them back is me. The only way you’re ever getting out of here alive is me.”

“And why would you do that?” Ryland asked. “You’re right. I’ve killed many of your kind, and I left to kill however many more I need to restore order in this preserve. What could you possibly want enough to deny your subjects their revenge” 

Furious dragons started forward, gnashing their terrible teeth. That would have been it. Ryland done in by Jaleesa or the fuzzy blue one to the right or the brown reptilian or any other, if Celebrant hadn’t halted them. 

“Enough,” Celebrant commanded. “He will not be killing anyone. How could he? He can hardly sit up. But they do not call me Celebrant the Just for nothing. Give me control of this preserve, take down all the boundaries, and I will let you leave with your life.” He didn’t seem to notice the outrage that took over his subjects' snouts. There was mercy for the dragonslayer. After everything. But he felt threatened enough by that little girl.

Ryland spat on the ground. “Then I guess you will have to kill me, won’t you? I won’t be giving you anything, Celebrant the Just,” he said in a mocking tone. “You all can rot here just as well without a caretaker.” 

“So be it,” Celebrant answered, stalking forward, tail scuffing the stone behind him. And leaning down, gaping darkness enclosed The Somber Knight. 

I could describe the terrible pain of dying, being snapped in half, in threes, in fours, so forth. There may be something to be said for relief, or peace, or how long there had been Ryland’s longing for just this, but I imagine staring up into pure nothing, he couldn’t help but fear, regret, or something. For everyone else, the fucker was gone in an instant. And no one present could manage to feel too bad for him.

~

Things had gone to shit far too fast for Lord Dalgorel to spare any thoughts on the treaty. There was a lot of panic around a fallen preserve, even with the nature of Terrabelle’s borders. It’s not as though the Fair Folk existed in a vacuum; no man is an island, after all.

Naturally, they were alarmed by the undead blocking off their city, crowding around the borders, clogging their roads. It was a siege, probably, meant to starve them out or some such. Though, all things considered, it might’ve been an attempt to stave off attempts at asylum seeking. Or, maybe that was just the uninfluenced nature of the undead, to seek out whatever warm bodies they could find. At least, that was the dry proposal of one councillor. Whatever reason for it, that was the first hour of the headache. Dalgorel personally didn’t see the relevancy of the why guessing game, but still the argument persisted.

The rest of that headache was spent on what to do. Sure, Terrabelle had warriors, guards, armed and armoured, just in case. Fanciful creatures who visited Lomo too often and listened to their parents bedtime stories a little too long. But it was all for ceremony, art or sport for soldiers who scowled at their peoples promise to stay out of it. They wrote gallant poetry, but they had nothing real in the way of looking an army of undead in the eye. No one was eager to spill their blood. And so they dithered and dithered and dithered over sending them out. Over how many or whether they even should or if they even had enough courage potions in reserve to even be debating any of this.

What not to do, what else to do. If they weren’t going to send soldiers, then what could they do in a siege. How much food did they have in storage? How much could reasonably be cultivated independently? How long could they run Terrabelle without the ability to export their dragon meal? Even without the undead, the dragons had overthrown the preserve, what would they want with the cereal, anyway. They’d probably refuse it on principle. Should they prepare for refugees? How were refugees supposed to get through the siege of undead, Councilor Greene? Honestly, at that point they might as well just deal with the dragons. Did you really just compare a well's worth of undead to a whole population of dragons, Administrator Koramine? 

So yeah. The catacombs lay empty and forgotten. 

~

It took almost a full minute of yelling and kicking at the door before they let Aurelia in, a nervous smile on the Fair Folk guard’s face. To the tentative, awkward hello, she responded by shoving past him into the city. Then there were multiple minutes of questions by bewildered officials.

“If I may ma’am, how did you get here exactly?” 

Aurelia flashed a dazzling smile, “Now, really, what sort of dragon would I be if I couldn’t make it past a few measly zombies? I flew here and knocked on the front door.”

The officials started away from her, tripping over their hems. A few guards shared anxious grimaces out of their shiny helmets, fumbling for their swords. 

The primary administrator questioning her coughed delicately. “Perhaps a more precise question then would be along the lines of ‘what do you mean by coming here?’”

Another official nodded, adding, “We have no quarrel with the dragons. We are a neutral people, and we have extended that policy to your war.”

“And I have no quarrel with you. It’s the dragons that seem to have a quarrel with me. That’s why I came here, as a woman maligned by her people, seeking refuge now that her enemies have gained power.”

“What kind of quarrel?” Lord Dalgorel asked, his eyebrows raised skeptically.

“Well first it was that I was simply too small for a dragon, too easy to pick on. And then when Celebrant’s son turned out even smaller, I’m sure that rubbed him the wrong way. It surely didn’t help things when I challenged the captain of his guard and then had the audacity to win, especially with the fate of Celebrant’s latest expulsion from his guard. And to top everything off, I was implicated in the killing of a fellow dragon, not the guard, mind you.” Aurelia sighed, “Basically, I’m not very well liked and never was, and I’m nervous for myself now, so I came here hoping for asylum.” 

Lord Dalgorel hummed. “And how are we to know allowing you refuge here wouldn’t enrage your king, then?”

Aurelia snorted, “Please. I’m not that high on Celebrant’s shit list.”

So they let her stay. 

Fools. 

They set her up with a little room in an inn, some rationed food, and her promise to swing by for some paperwork in the morning. Then they left her alone.

When she snuck out a few hours later no one knew enough to look twice at the bright-haired woman, not quite up to their standards in height, gliding through their streets towards the old prison. Who could blame her? The prison looked twice as attractive as before, as many chuckled that Lomo would be the last of them to starve if this siege held out and others whispered about getting sent off, maybe, for a bar-fight or some such.

And there was nobody to notice when she creeped down to the catacombs, empty and silent as a tomb. She jumped at shadows and started at every creak and whir, but the cold halls were simply bare. Even at The Somber Knight’s chamber, they posted no guard. On his throne not even a dust bunny had collected. 

Aurelia gave herself a sickly grin, rubbing the pads of her fingers. She started feeling at the wall, unsure if it would be hidden in this room, or if she was searching for a whole new room. Her king’s theory -or, rather, the theory he’d been offered- had simply been that it would be down here somewhere. That The Somber Knight had been sent here to guard the treaty, otherwise why tuck him away like this, hidden in neutral territory. 

What she found was a door, hidden in the room’s right corner, with a keyhole nearly indiscernible from a crack in the yellowing stone. The key was more difficult, but it turned out to be stashed inside the arm of the dragonslayer’s unassuming throne. 

The door lead down a flight of slippery wet stairs, chipping away in places, walls narrowing down into a soggy tunnel, all ending in another door, disguised as a dead end. 

Rubbing her arms in the cold and the slight claustrophobia, she tried the new door with the last’s key, relieved when it swung open to a dusty room full of more paper than Aurelia had ever seen in her entire life. 

It was almost intimidating, how many pages there were, all cramped with tiny writing from multiple hands, in slanted english, latin, draconic, silvan, etc. Wall to wall there were towers of sheets, several taller than she was, each neat and tidy, without a single loose falling paper for Aurelia to smudge under foot. In the center of the room there was a table, the only one in the room, which housed an enormous binder, in weathered leather, engraved to say _Treaty of Wyrmroost, Secret Dragon Sanctuary_ over and over again in a number of languages. She grimaced, shielding her face from dust as she pulled back the binder’s cover. 

Inside the binder was a sheet numbered with a crisp 1 in the corner, labeled _Table of Contents_ before listing out separate sections for _1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, the whole first binder_ , probably. Aurelia gave up. She wasn’t here to read the dusty old thing, anyway. 

She was here because she was little, and this was a job for a little dragon who didn’t need to worry about shifting in a little room. At least that she didn’t lie about. And Celebrant told her she’d get Raxtus’ job if she could pull this off. And hadn’t she better? This was easy. And from the guard, she’d work her way into captain. And all she had to do was get rid of the treaty. 

As a slim short yellow dragon, Aurelia unhooked her jaw and set the whole room blazing. 

~

As the old sheets crackled and blackened, curling into crumbling ash that powdered a new floor, the boundaries outside fell away. All but the two sizzled out of existence one by one as a new clause in a new section was engulfed in flames.

**Author's Note:**

> I really didn't mean for this to take me this long, but months and many midterms later, here we are.


End file.
